The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (17 page)

Boston, Massachusetts
July 3
1991

T
HE UPSTAIRS SPECIAL COLLECTIONS READING ROOM OF THE
B
OSTON
Athenaeum was entirely empty, and Connie checked her watch for the fifth time in an hour, wondering if she should take the delay as a none-too-subtle hint. The research librarian had made no attempt to conceal his irritation when she asked for the book to be paged.

“All right,
fine
,” he whispered. “But we close early today. Wait over there.” He pointed at the chair positioned squarely in the patch of sun under the window, farthest away from the fan, and now Connie felt a blanket of warmth pressing into her back. A trickle of sweat snaked down from her eyebrow into the hollow on the side of her nose, and she wiped it away with irritation.
Fifteen more minutes
, she promised herself.
I can wait for fifteen more minutes.
Her pencil shaded in the leaves on the drawing of a dandelion that she had traced in the margins of her notebook. Presently her mind soft
ened, pulling a transparent scrim of daydream up in front of the table where she sat, on which she saw projected a perfect film of Sam, brushing back his wet hair under the moonlight. She allowed herself to move further into the dream, her lips curving.

“You the one waiting for the Bartlett journal?” asked the young librarian, his face dour. Connie blinked, pulled back to her table, her notebook, the sun on her back, and the man standing bent over a cart bearing several stacked archival boxes.

“Yes,” she said, pushing back in her chair to reach for the first box.

“Just a minute,” said the young man, brushing her aside. “You’re familiar with the rules, I hope. No pens. Use the foam blocks to prop the covers open so that the spines don’t crack. No photocopying. Open only one box at a time. Handle the manuscripts as little as possible, wearing these.” He deposited a pair of new white cotton gloves on the table next to her. “And frankly, you really shouldn’t be sitting in the sun,” he finished, casting a baleful look at Connie.

“I’m happy to move,” she said, too tired even to argue.

Soon ensconced in the blessed shade at the end of a long table, Connie slid the first box toward her, gloved hands gripping the edges lightly. She opened the acid-free box, untied the fragile string that was looped around the book inside, and settled the first volume of the journal atop two green foam wedges. She eased the cover open and read the title page.

Diary of Prudence Bartlett,
it read in faint, watery script.
January 1, 1741–December 31, 1746.

Connie caught her breath, heady with anticipation. Prudence had not been mentioned by name in the fragmentary record of Mercy Lamson’s 1715 lawsuit, but she had appeared as the sole heir on Mercy’s probate record. Though New Englanders were a famously literate people, very few colonists had left anything so explicit as a diary—even fewer women. Connie was astonished when a cursory call to the Boston Athenaeum revealed that Prudence Lamson Bartlett kept a journal, which had found its way into their special collections. So far Connie knew that the recipe book had passed into
Prudence’s hands at Mercy’s death, or possibly before, but she had not been able to find Prudence’s own will or probate. Records that old, Connie knew, were often incomplete or damaged, but the disappearance of Prudence’s probate list had left her feeling crushed. There had been a dark afternoon last week when Connie telephoned Liz in a self-pitying panic, convinced that she would not be able to find Deliverance’s book after all.

Now she sat at the reading table, poised to devour an unimaginably rare variety of primary source. Prudence’s diary stretched over several volumes from 1741, the year after her marriage, when she was around twenty-six years old, to shortly before her death in 1798–over one hundred years after the Salem witch trials. Connie opened the book, her pale eyes shining in excitement, and began to read, pencil poised over her notebook.

Connie sank her head into her hands with a groan. Of course it was unrealistic to expect long, reflective passages about the nature of womanhood in the eighteenth century, but
really
. The tedium of an afternoon slog through the minutiae of Prudence’s daily life stretched ahead of her, and Connie felt her excitement seep away, melting through her feet into the floor. She turned over a few thick leaves of the book, skipping ahead.

Connie leaned closer, concentrating.

Connie paged deeper into the journal, finding several entries of an almost identical content. She sifted through the stultifying repetition, trying to read between the lines to uncover details that Prudence would not have thought to state explicitly. Of course a woman who produced much of her own food would think that the weather was an important matter for her journal. She would have pored over almanacs for the same reason. Connie could feel frustrated that this distant daughter of taciturn Puritans would not have had the cultural knowledge necessary to reflect in print on her inner life, but that frustration would be misplaced. In some respects, Prudence’s daily work
was
her inner life. Connie read further, working her way through day after day of weather reports, gardening projects, comings and goings of the inscrutable Josiah, repeated calls to aid suffering neighborhood women. All of a sudden Connie laughed when she realized the obvious answer.

“Of course!” Connie said aloud. “Prudence was a midwife!” The librarian glared at her from behind his desk.

“Oh, c’mon, there’s no one else here!” she called across the room, annoyed.

“Shhhhhhhh!” he shushed, finger held to his lips.

Connie cackled to herself, enjoying her minor rebellion while jotting comments in her notebook. Maybe she gave in to her desire to defy the librarian in part to offset the taciturn restraint that bounded Prudence’s experience. The more she read, the more she had to fight the urge to stand up on the table, turn a cartwheel in the aisle. She almost felt like she owed it to Prudence to misbehave.

Connie wrote down every fact that she could glean from the dates in the journal, trying to peer through the dull words on the page to see the living, breathing life that they portrayed. After four hours of concentrated work, she had read every entry from 1745 through 1763: nearly two decades of weather reports, domestic labor, and payment for delivering women’s babies. Connie stretched, bringing her arms overhead, bending her shoulder blades over the back of the library chair. The blood drained down from her fingertips, and she flexed them, pencil held aloft. She pushed the open journal away, rubbing her eyelids, and then turned to her notes.

So far the journal mentioned nothing about Prudence’s infamous grandmother. The contours of Prudence’s life slowly emerged: she was a midwife and apparently a skilled one, as she had not yet lost a mother, and had lost only a handful of babies. She was married to a man named Josiah Bartlett, who appeared to make his living as a shoreman, loading and unloading ship cargo when it landed at the Marblehead docks. The Bartletts seem to have been long-standing friends of Prudence’s family, though Connie could not quite pinpoint how she had gathered that impression. Prudence seemed well regarded by her neighbors, though perhaps lacking in what Connie would have called friends. She lived in Marblehead but attended church sporadically. She traveled only when called to see a patient, but those were scattered throughout Essex County: in Danvers, Manchester, Beverly, as far north as Newburyport and as far south as Lynn.

A few entries stood out enough to warrant copying verbatim, and Connie looked over them again.

Connie was not sure what this entry could mean, but Prudence so rarely commented on anyone other than her own patients and her family that the note about Peter Petford—whoever he was—had leapt off of the page. Connie drew a dark asterisk next to the name in her notebook, a reminder to look for him elsewhere.

Connie smiled. She had stared at this entry for all of five minutes before she deduced that it marked the day that Prudence herself gave birth to a daughter, whose name was as ponderous as Prudence’s own.

Connie was not certain but felt reasonably sure that this entry marked the death of Prudence’s father. She sat back in her chair, thinking. What restraint, Prudence writing such a sterile entry for a lost parent. She could not imagine responding so coolly if she had been aware when Leo went missing overseas. And though Grace rarely spoke of Lemuel Goodwin, her father, when she did so it was always with tenderness and regret. What was Mercy’s response to the loss of Jedediah Lamson? The journal did not say. What had Granna done when she lost Lemuel? No historians that she
knew of ever really talked about the mental world of women who outlived their men.

She frowned. Of course, most of the men that she had come across while looking into Deliverance’s family had not just predeceased their wives; they had died in accidents. Violent, wretched accidents. She suspected that if she ever found more information about Nathaniel Dane, who predeceased Deliverance, he would fit the pattern as well. Dangerous work, living in the past.

No other evidence for the first name of Mercy Lamson’s husband had manifested itself, but she could see no other reason for the event to be recorded as part of Prudence’s day. Her suspicion was bolstered by an entry from the following month.

Prudence had made no previous mention of her mother, but following this entry Mercy appeared periodically, illustrated using the same language that Prudence employed for other members of her household. Mercy was described going to church, often taking baby Patience (called “Patty”) with her, or working in the garden, or occasionally traveling with Prudence to visit an expectant mother. They seemed to settle in together, though no mention was made of Mercy’s helping with the household expenses. She appeared to have been taken in by Prudence out of pity rather than preference.

Why Prudence had paid no visits to her mother in the preceding four years before they combined households, Connie could not fathom. Had they not gotten along? Of course mothers and daughters with strong personalities might see the world from very different points of view. She wrinkled her nose, uncomfortably aware of this echoing truth in her own relationship with Grace. Or Grace’s relationship with Sophia, for that matter. Connie’s hypothesis about their troubled relationship received modest support from an entry some years later.

Connie looked over this jotting, unsure. The journal writing was so brief and focused that reading tone or intent into the chosen words smacked to her of overinterpretation. Even so, this entry felt significant to her. Angry, almost. Connie rested her forehand in her hands, tapping at the top of her head with her fingertips, eyes fixed upon her notes.

Then, in 1763, Connie found the event that the church records and the probate office foreshadowed. She hazarded a look over her shoulder at the young librarian behind the desk and saw him absorbed with reshelving. Under the table Connie tugged on each gloved fingertip, slipped her left hand out of its warm cotton cover, and crept the naked hand across the desk to brush her skin over the handwriting on the page. Prudence’s own hand had moved over that same page, pressed into the paper. The ink carried little ancient flecks of her skin where she had licked her quill tip, or had rubbed out a word. Connie tried to reach into the realm that Prudence and Mercy had occupied, tried to conjure the sensation that would illuminate Prudence’s vanished self. Her fingers came to rest on a narrow block of passages written at the end of the page, words cramped together like little ants disassembling a beetle.